


What Do They Know (About You And Me)

by millepertuis



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Clonecest, F/F, Pre-Canon, The Genesis of the Clone Club
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:00:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millepertuis/pseuds/millepertuis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Beth surprised Alison, and one time Alison surprised her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Do They Know (About You And Me)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [botherd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/botherd/gifts).



> Title from One Night Only's _You And Me_.  
>  Happy Yuletide! Hope you like it!

 

1.

Alison’s fumbling around her purse for her keys when she hears footsteps behind her.

“Hello,” calls someone—a woman. Her voice sounds familiar in a way Alison can’t quite place. She finally finds her keys and wraps her hand tight around them.

When she turns around, it’s to come face to face with herself. Except no, not really. The woman has messier hair—messier everything, because most people aren’t as tightly drawn as Alison, don’t need order quite as much—and that’s not really the kind of clothes Alison would wear. The makeup, the shoes, the way the other woman slouches slightly—all that isn’t like Alison at all. Her face, too, isn’t anything Alison’s ever seen in a mirror. She can recognize the wariness in her eyes, the worry lines on her forehead, the tentativeness in her smile, but the rest of her is completely alien.

 

 

 

2.

When she turns the vacuum cleaner off, she hears an insistent banging at the door. “I told him not to forget his keys,” she mutters to herself. She’s been annoyed with Donnie for a couple of days, and she’s ready to blow up at him for not listening to her, for leaving his dirty socks on the bathroom floor again, for not looking at her the way he did when they were seventeen anymore, but when she opens the door, it’s not Donnie on the other side.

“Hi,” says Beth. Ugh. She wants to close the door on her face and ignore her until she goes away, but she doesn’t want the neighbours to look out their window and see Beth. Aynsley and Donnie will want to talk about it if they find out, and she can’t pretend nothing’s happening if they do that. 

“Don’t you have work or something?” she asks while Beth comes inside.

“It’s fine. Look, about what I said last time—”

“Do you want some coffee?”

“Sure. Thanks. I really think—”

“Sugar? Milk?”

“I’m fine—”

“What is it you do again?”

Beth grabs her arm.

“Listen up, dipshit. I’m your clone, you’re my clone, whatever. That’s not gonna go away. You have to deal with this.”

“I don’t have to deal with _anything_ ,” Alison says, pulling away. “That’s crazy. _You’re_ crazy.” That’s her luck alright: she has a secret twin sister who’s completely nuts. Hopefully it’s a freak occurrence and doesn’t run in the family. Maybe she should ask for a medical history. 

Beth sighs and takes something out of her pocket. She holds up photographs to Alison’s face.

“Look, this is Cosima—”

“You with dreadlocks.”

“And this is Katja—”

“You with a wig.”

Beth looks vaguely homicidal. That’s fine. They’re in Alison’s kitchen; she’s the one who knows where all the knives are. Everything’s fine. There are steps to take, she’s pretty sure. Professional help, to begin with. Alison doesn’t really like to rely on others like that, to bring her problems to other people, but it’s fine. She can fix this.

She puts Beth’s coffee on the table and sits down with her own cup. Beth reaches inside her pocket again and Alison tenses for a second, but no, it’s just her phone. “Yeah, it’s me,” Beth says into her phone after the other person answers. “No, she’s being difficult again. Can you get on Skype or something? Yeah, thanks.” She hangs up. “Cosima’s just finishing up something and then you’ll see her.”

“There’s something called triplets—”

“We don’t have the same birthday! Katja was born in _Germany_!”

“Drink your coffee,” Alison snaps. Beth rolls her eyes but sits down and takes a sip. They drink in silence for a while. It’s a little awkward, but what can you expect? Alison will just give Beth over to a psychiatrist or to rehab, and then they won’t have to see each other at all. She could invite her for Thanksgiving, she supposes. Once a year isn’t too much to ask, and who knows? After she’s rid of her science-fiction delusions, Beth might even be nice to have around.

“These your kids?” Beth asks out of the blue, pointing at a photo on the fridge. Alison feels wary again. “Yes,” she says eventually. “Do you have any?” 

Beth makes a weird face. “No. I—um, turns out I can’t.”

“Oh,” she says awkwardly/ “I couldn’t either,” she adds on an impulse. “But it’s fine now. It doesn’t have to mean—Adoption is fine. It’s great, even.”

Beth nods. She looks a little—wistful, Alison thinks.

She takes another sip of coffee. 

 

 

 

3.

Alison wakes up feeling particularly good. She goes easily through her morning routine—prepares breakfast, picks out clothes for Gemma and Oscar, kisses them on the forehead on their way out, and Donnie on the cheek. They’re in one of their difficult patches again, so he throws her a surprised look, but even that’s not enough to break her out of her good mood.

“Have a nice day!” she calls after them as they climb in the car.

She hums along the radio as she starts to tidy up the house. Gemma is very neat, but Oscar never makes his bed, and he tends to leave his things all over the house. 

The phone rings as she’s ironing Donnie’s shirts. 

“Hello?”

“I’m outside your house. Can you get away for a couple of hours?”

It takes her a second to recognize Beth’s voice, and then her good mood vanishes. 

So sometimes Alison wakes up feeling like it was all just a dream—like maybe she just fell asleep with a sci-fi novel or something. Big deal. And she just lets herself believe it for a while, sometimes. Often. Most days, really.

Okay, so she’s in denial. Whatever. She’d like to see how you deal with clones popping out of nowhere left and right.

She looks out the window and, sure enough, she recognizes Beth’s car parked down the street.

“Are you there?”

“Yeah,” she answers. “Give me a minute.”

She puts the iron back in the closet, turns off the radio, grabs her key, her coat, and locks the front door behind her. 

Beth just has to throw one look at her face when Alison gets in the car to realize what she’s thinking: “No, everything’s fine!” she reassures her immediately. “Sorry, I should’ve said that. I just figured—we don’t really know what might happen, so you should be prepared.”

She gestures to her holster.

“What? You want to teach me how to shoot?” Alison asks, certain she’s misunderstanding.

“Well, yeah.”

She thinks about it for a minute.

“Yeah, okay.”

Alison has never thought of herself as powerless, still doesn’t, but it’s not like it can hurt.

 

 

 

Beth takes her to a deserted field. Alison watches as she sets up empty beer bottles in a line, then explains to her how to load the gun, how to aim it, how to hold herself while she fires. 

Then Beth hands her the gun and Alison tries to imitate what Beth just showed her.

“Wait,” Beth says. She nudges Alison’s feet further apart with her leg. That close, she can smell Beth’s shampoo. It’s not the same one Alison uses. She doesn’t know why it surprises her, but suddenly it’s all she can focus on, that and Beth’s hand on her hip, hot even through Alison’s clothes.

“There,” Beth says, and pulls away. Alison feels off-balance for a second before she pulls herself together, aims the gun, and fires.

The blowback surprises her, but not as much as the sound of the gun going off does. She feels a little like her eardrums have been torn apart. Her shot went wide, but she expected it to. Beth gestures to her to continue, so she does.

It’s not until her fourth shot that she hits a bottle. As the glass shatters she feels something breaks inside her as well. It’s weeks later, but that’s when the realization truly hits that her whole life—her whole _existence_ is a lie. Her parents and her children and her husband and her house and her friends and her own sense of self, everything is the result of some messed-up experiment, of some arrogant fucker deciding to play God. She’s trapped—she’s always been trapped, but she’s just now realizing it.

She can’t breathe, she notices distantly. And that’s bad, because—because—

“Alison!” calls Beth. She sounds a little like she’s above Alison. Oh, that makes sense: Alison’s on the ground. Has she always been on the ground? She thinks—

“Alison,” Beth repeats. She’s on the ground, too, now. Her face is close to Alison’s. Alison likes Beth’s face. It’s cute. More expressive than Alison’s, too. And she never looks worried. Beth is so put together. But now she looks concerned. Alison reaches out, wanting to smooth the lines on her forehead, wanting Beth to smile instead, but she snaps back to herself right before she gets to them and jerks her hand away.

“Sorry,” she says, looking away. Why was she—Why did she want—

“It’s fine. Cosima had a way bigger freak-out than that. Well, I think it was a freak-out. Mostly she threw things and yelled about science.”

Her hands are still on Alison’s arms, anchoring her. They’re so close that Alison can feel Beth’s breath against the side of her head. She can deal with a clone conspiracy or she can deal with a big gay freak-out but she can’t deal with both, so she pretends she doesn’t want to lean in even closer and shuts her eyes very tight.

 

 

 

4.

She likes Cosima just fine, but there’s something different about Beth, Alison thinks. She’s always so strong and level-headed; it helps settle Alison, helps keep her panic at bay. Beth just never loses her cool.

So when Alison opens the door to find Beth shaking in the rain, her clothes soaked, her eyes and nose red from crying, her lips red where she’s biting them, she’s a little taken aback.

“I’m sorry,” Beth blurts out while Alison stares at her, and even her voice is unsteady. Alison doesn’t know what to do at all. “I know I’m not supposed to come here unannounced, but I—”

“It’s fine,” Alison cuts in, reaching out to pull Beth inside, and it is fine. Donnie took the kids out to his parents for the weekend, as Beth already knows because Alison went on and on about how delighted she was to have the house for herself when they talked on the phone a couple of days ago.

“Wait here, I’m gonna get you some dry clothes.” She’s halfway across the room before she has to turn back. “Seriously”, she insists, “don’t move at all.” Beth nods and Alison finally rushes out of the room, maybe out of worry that Beth will catch a cold, maybe out of worry Beth will get mud and water everywhere. Okay, mostly the second.

When she comes back, Beth hasn’t moved an inch, but she hasn’t managed to pull herself together either. It suddenly occurs to Alison that something bad might have happened—well, it had occurred to her before, obviously, Beth looked like her whole world had been torn apart, but she hadn’t considered that maybe it was clone-related. She wants to interrogate Beth, wants to grab her and shake her until Beth gets pissed at her and goes back to being the strongest person she knows. But she figures if Alison or her family had been in danger, Beth would have opened with that, same with if Cosima had had an accident or maybe a drug overdose—Alison knows what kids get up to in college these days. She puts the clothes on the table and softly brushes the towel over Beth’s hair, and then, even more softly, over her face. She leaves her hand on Beth’s cheek when she’s done and Beth leans into the touch, taking a shaky breath. 

“Come on,” Alison urges her gently. “Take off your shoes and go get changed, you’ll catch your death.”

“Yeah,” Beth says. Now that they’re standing so close together, she realizes that they’re the same height. Which is—obvious, they’re clones, so Alison doesn’t really know why in her mind Beth seems so much taller. 

“Do you have anything to drink?” Alison nods and goes to grab the vodka that one of Donnie’s co-workers gave them a while back.

She pours them shots and downs one while she waits for Beth. 

Seeing Beth in her clothes feels like an electric shock. They should seem even more alike, but somehow the differences jump out to Alison—the way the sweats stretch differently over Beth’s more pronounced muscles, how Beth messily rolled over her sleeves, how the way Beth slouches a little makes her shirt fall differently over her abdomen.

Beth sits down and drinks her shot. Alison pours them both another, and then another, and then another.

“I think something’s going on with Paul,” Beth confesses.

“Who’s Paul?”

“My boyfriend.”

“You never said you had a boyfriend.”

“You don’t talk about your husband either.” Alison doesn’t know how to talk about Donnie—she usually talks about Gemma and Oscar instead. They’re her kids, and they’re easy to talk about, easy to love. Donnie isn’t easy to love; he hasn’t been for a while. She doesn’t know how to talk about that. She doesn’t know how to deal with that at all.

 

“What do you mean, something’s going on with him? You think he’s cheating on you?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, then?”

“I woke up the other night and—I think he might be with them. I think they’re watching me.”

 

 

 

5.

When she gets back, Beth is seating on the couch.

“I broke up with Paul,” Beth says nonchalantly, so Alison refrains from stabbing her to death for giving her a heart attack and goes to put away the groceries. In thanks, Beth gets up to help.

“Really?” she says. “And how did that go?”

“Fine. I moved out yesterday.”

“Oh. Do you have a place to stay? I’d offer, but—”

“I know. Don’t worry, I’m staying with Art for a couple of days, until I find a place. I’m not very picky.”

She hands Alison the apples, and her sleeve falls back a little to show a glimpse of darker skin. Alison takes the apples, puts them in the fridge. “What is that?” she asks calmly. She’s very aware of the gun Beth gave her, in her purse, on the table.

“What? The carrots?” Alison takes Beth’s hand and pulls back the sleeve. There’s a purple bruise there, all around the arm, like someone grabbed her and squeezed very hard. “Did he do that?” she asks.

“Look, it’s fine. It’s over now, he’s gone.”

Alison clenches her teeth and doesn’t say anything. She can’t look away from the bruise. She wants to bend down and kiss it better, but she’s afraid she might want it for the wrong reasons. 

And she wants to press down on the bruise, too, so hard that Beth will only be able to think about her whenever she looks down at it, that she’ll even forget that Paul was the one to put this mark on her, that she won’t remember Paul at all, but there’s no right reason to want that, not a single one. And Beth is strong and brave and her only anchor when everything is going to hell. She can’t—

“What? Are you gonna kiss it better?” Beth asks lightly, but her eyes are intent on Alison’s face so she bends down and does.

 

 

 

 

+

 

“I have a surprise for you,” Beth tells her on the phone.

“What is it?”

Alison never liked surprises, okay, and that was _before_ she was pulled into a clone conspiracy. She’s not going to be less wary now that there are copies of herself walk around and that her husband’s having secret meetings with a scientist.

“You’ll see.”

 

 

 

She knocks on the door of Beth’s new apartment and it opens on— _This is not Beth_ , she thinks. It’s Beth’s clothes and it’s Beth’s face and it’s Beth’s posture and it’s almost her smile, but it’s not her eyes. It’s not the way she looks at Alison.

“Who are you?” she asks. She slips her hand inside her purse, and grabs the gun Beth gave her. She hasn’t left the house without it since they realized they were watched. She hasn’t been in the house without something she could use as a weapon since she followed Donnie and realized he was monitoring her, either.

“Calm down,” not-Beth says, but Alison doesn’t, not until Beth appears behind the other clone and smiles to her, her eyes sparkling, looking delighted.

“This is Sarah,” Beth says. “I found her at the train station.”

 

 

 

After, when Sarah’s asleep on the couch—or pretending to be, at least, because Alison sure hasn’t fallen asleep that easily since Beth came into her life—, Beth leans in to tell her: “I wasn’t sure you’d notice.” _That she wasn’t me_ , she doesn’t add. Alison is fluent in Beth-speak. She can tell under the smile that Beth was worried, that Beth is still a little worried, a little unsure; like she doesn’t know Alison would recognize her anywhere, with her eyes closed, in the dark, her ears covered. 

“I did,” she says. “I notice you.”

Beth’s smile widens; it unfurls something warm in Alison’s chest.

She remembers the first time she saw Beth, how Beth was worried and hesitant but smiled to her anyway, took a chance—and the emotion on her face that she couldn’t quite name, she thinks it was hope, against everything. Alison’s never been hopeful. She never had any reason to be, never had anything to hope for. She married Donnie straight out of high school and they got kids and she immediately stopped working and it was all very easy, no place for uncertainties. 

But she thinks it was hope on Beth’s face because Beth looks at her the same way now, hesitant but like she still longs for something, like she’s going to try anyway, and Alison, well, for the first time, Alison thinks she might know what hope feels like

When Beth leans in close, Alison still wants to get even closer, but, maybe, she thinks, maybe that’s not so bad.


End file.
